For those who were waiting with baited breath for the launch of Mac OS X Leopard at the Worldwide Developer’s Conference in June, you are going to have to wait a bit longer. Apple just dropped a bombshell, claiming that, despite their promise that they would ship Leopard this spring, we won’t be seeing it on Apple Store shelves until October 2007. The reason for the delay? One word: iPhone. From Apple:

iPhone contains the most sophisticated software ever shipped on a mobile device, and finishing it on time has not come without a price—we had to borrow some key software engineering and QA resources from our Mac OS® X team, and as a result we will not be able to release Leopard at our Worldwide Developers Conference in early June as planned. While Leopard’s features will be complete by then, we cannot deliver the quality release that we and our customers expect from us. We now plan to show our developers a near final version of Leopard at the conference, give them a beta copy to take home so they can do their final testing, and ship Leopard in October. We think it will be well worth the wait. Life often presents tradeoffs, and in this case we’re sure we’ve made the right ones.

Whoa. Think about that for a moment. Apple claims that the software on the iPhone, which is supposedly a stripped down and optimized OS X, is so sophisticated that they had to move resources from the Mac OS X team to the iPhone team to get iPhone out the door in June. Developers who attend WWDC will instead walk away with a beta version of Leopard.

If that isn’t enough proof that Apple sees the iPhone as their main focus right now, we don’t know what else they could do to convince you of that fact. Still, we guess that, on the positive side, the fact that Apple is delaying the OS as opposed to releasing an under-performing version of it’s next-gen OS only to patch it up in a few months, is a good thing.